FORECAST CATEGORY IN FOLKLORE TEXTS

Abstract

Folklore texts, which are small text genres, belong to the paremiological fund of language and are the bearers of "folk wisdom." The function of forecasting plays a crucial role in many paroemias (omens, superstitions, proverbs). Forecasting is understood as a modeling of the outcome of an event, aimed at the future. The relevance of this work stems from the need for a complete and comprehensive study of forecasting to effectively utilize forecasting strategies at various levels of life—from everyday activities to scientific study. The goal of this study is to analyze the types of forecasting expressed in folklore texts such as proverbs, omens, superstitions, riddles, slogans, and axioms. The material for this analysis was folklore texts from the aforementioned paroemic genres. We believe that in folklore texts, forecasting can function as a textual category. It is represented in the text through grammatical constructions of the future tense—the generic use of verbs, imperative constructions with future tense meanings, conditional sentences, as well as the use of conjunctions to express logical consequence ("event A leads to (к) event B"), and the disjunctive conjunctions "либо… либо," and "то ли… то ли" to express choice. Furthermore, the purpose of the text itself may be to make a prediction, as in riddles. The study of prediction from the perspective of textual categories demonstrates the scientific novelty of the research.